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Edited on Sun Jan-30-05 03:05 PM by poe
The January 30 elections in Iraq - held under prevailing conditions of violence and US military occupation, not to mention the boycott of the Sunni community - have as their sole aim to grant a shaky legitimacy to the US military occupation and to justify the invasion of Iraq without the authorization of the Security Council of the United Nations.
Even though Canada was not a member of the Bush administration's "coalition of the willing", Ottawa is now supporting an "electoral process" which is neither "independent" nor the expression of Iraqi sovereignty. Canada is thus contributing to granting legitimacy not only to the act of aggression, but also to numerous pretexts and lies, not to mention the underlying disinformation campaign used to justify the war on Iraq.
In this way, Canada is complicit not only in the US war agenda, but also in a public relations campaign aimed at enhancing the image of the Bush administration in Iraq, which in spite of a bogus transfer of sovereignty to a "transitional" governmental body, nonetheless maintains some 150,000 occupation troops in this supposedly "sovereign" country.
If indeed, according to Kingsley, this fundamental role is one of providing legitimacy, then what is being legitimized and justified, in the case of Iraq, is not democracy, but the criminal invasion and occupation of which the Iraqi people are the victims.
Thus, Iraq "wins", in terms of "democracy", what it has lost in human lives (100,000, according to The Lancet ), not to mention the derogation of its national sovereignty and the destruction of an entire national infrastructure. Destroyed by coalition forces, this infrastructure is now slated to be selectively rebuilt, with billions of dollars accruing to US corporations under Iraq's "post-war reconstruction". Moreover, according to Kingsley, participation in an observation mission constitutes acknowledgement of the validity of an electoral process, and serves to confirm and communicate this message of "acknowledgement".
But the present electoral process in Iraq is illegitimate because it serves mainly US objectives, and because truly democratic objectives cannot be realized under the prevailing conditions of insecurity in Iraq which prevent people in many regions from voting. In addition, it is unacceptable to grant legitimacy to an invasion and an occupation which violate the fundamental principles, established half a century ago by the Nuremberg Tribunal, which qualify military aggression as the "supreme international crime":
"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore in not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
When the essential conditions of democracy are not present, the election itself serves first and foremost an American "agenda" of military domination of the entire Middle East region. www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CRG501C.html
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